By admin 
This is Part 2 of a three-part serialization. Read Part 1.
III. LOST
As my crew and I watched the provisions float away on the Thames, I wondered whether my power would diminish as the men’s hunger grew. As if reading my mind, Teeshy McGann announced that he’d located a cask of flour that hadn’t been cast overboard during the gust of wind.
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It was important to ration, so I announced that everyone could have “one paw-full and not a smidge more.” And I insisted that the crew dine before their commanding officers. But we quickly found that the flour was contaminated, and, to a man, they retched overboard with such force that some of their jetsam splashed onto the hems of their wives’ dresses onshore.
Instead of being angry, I felt compassion for the vomiting men. Using an old sea-dog trick, I tied a piece of fat from a dead pig on a string and had each crewman swallow it, then pulled it back up—to settle his stomach. But no good deed goes unpunished. They would immediately ask for a sip of water to rinse the vomit and pig fat out, and I’d had all the casks of freshwater thrown overboard. “I don’t know what to say to ya!” I’d yell, then order them to have twenty lashes across the back.
McGann asked me whether I felt good about our current direction. I wasn’t deeply educated on navigation techniques, but I knew the basics from watching my father. I squinted at the sun, then dipped a knotted string into the water and whispered numbers to myself. I told McGann, “We’re on course, and by this time tomorrow we’ll cross the equator—that dirty whore of a line!” McGann seemed doubtful, but some other men whooped and hollered, and that felt great.
Spirits were high for the first time since we’d launched. We’d lost a few good souls, but my calculations had us weeks ahead of schedule. McGann pointed out that you could still see Dunkirk’s Clothier on Wells Street—which would put us less than a nautical mile from the dock. (Indeed, about two hundred feet.)
I listened to his points, stroking my little black beard. If McGann was right, I was a fool. I dipped the string in the water again.
“You’re not right, and I’m not right,” I said. “We’re simply lost.”
McGann seemed scared or frustrated.
“Captain!” someone cried. “Come take a look at this!”
“Pesky” O’Neall, as he’d later be nicknamed by me, pointed out that many crew members had deep purple spots on their arms and legs. In fact, two-thirds of the men had come aboard ravaged with scurvy. Despite living on land, they simply hadn’t eaten an orange in months—two-thirds of them hadn’t! Not one orange in the past few months. Or even a tiny squirt of lime in their drink. They just didn’t know that was a good thing to do.
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The afflicted suffered joint pain, tooth loss, and bleeding from the eyes. Broken bones that had healed years ago snapped again, collectively causing a steady bone-popping sound that was admittedly distracting to me as I looked over the weird maps and tried to identify how close we were to the Tahitian women. (I was starting to wonder whether we should abandon the South Pole of it all and just head straight to Polynesia.)
We soon found that randomly snapping bones was one of the more desirable manifestations of the brutal affliction. Some unfortunate men had their brains swell and pop inside their skulls. Thankfully, the cerebral mush often settled in such a way that the sailor could still walk around and do basic tasks (and no longer remember their name or who they were related to, which made me jealous!). But some pieces of the shattered brain would become lodged in the nasal canals and have to be discharged. Hence the modern-day expression “He’s so dumb, he could blast his brain out in one sneeze.”
The stress of the situation began to wear at the mental stability of the healthy men. Shorty McMolty pranced around the deck, singing, “I’m a prince and it’s my birthday!” Moments later, Pally MacMurter marched around with a mop on his head, saying that he was a Jamaican woman and it was Christmas. The men accused Pally of basically doing what Shorty had done but changing it a little bit. He pointed out that he really had been to Jamaica and it had come from that, but then threw up and died.
The scurvy-ridden men below deck began to succumb as well. Although the deaths were coming more rapidly, I treated each one equally. Every fallen crewman was wrapped in the Union Jack and lowered into the water with prayers and a full gun salute. Their wives then waded into the Thames and dragged them ashore, sometimes nobly heaving the wet flag back on deck so it could be used on the next fallen hero.
One can only imagine their horror when they unwrapped their husbands to find that rats, shipworms, and ratworms had eaten much of their beloveds’ faces, regardless of how recently they’d passed. The hungry buggers lacked patience and tact. Indeed, it was a very lucky woman who was able to gaze upon her husband’s full dead face as she dragged it ashore.
I started to unravel a bit myself. Apparently, I was heard saying that I “never really wanted this job” and that I was “really scared of big waves.” This was said to be bad for morale. But, worst of all, my sob-screams were heard by my father. He furrowed his brow in disappointment. ♦
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